“If George Washington’s, my father, why wasn’t he Chicano?" by Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

 Friends:

In memory of Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca (1926–2018), pioneering scholar, writer, and founding voice of Chicano Studies. I first came to know and admire him in the late 1970s as a college student at Angelo State University in San Angelo, Texas. He moved with a quiet dignity, an air that seemed to carry history itself, and the respect he commanded flowed from his defining contributions to the birth of Chicana and Chicano Studies.

When Dr. Ortego first penned this essay in 2012, the attacks on Raza Studies (Mexican American/Chicana/o Studies) in Arizona were already alarming. Consider that this was pre-Trump America, before MAGA nationalism became a governing ideology. What we are reading here is the continuity of a conservative mindset that traffics in fear and promotes willful ignorance—one that has long sought to erase Mexican American history and silence Ethnic Studies. Do note the list of books he lists below of those that were banned by the Arizona Department of Education.

I testified in the precedent-setting Arizona court case, Arce v. Douglas (2017), which struck at the heart of Mexican American Studies. Though my book,Subtractive Schooling, was not formally on the list of banned titles, documents obtained through discovery made clear that it had been used as the very pretext to justify banning them all (scroll to the bottom to see the list).

The title of this piece comes from the last lines of a poem by Richard Olivas, who once asked in a history class: “If George Washington’s my father, why wasn’t he Chicano?” That question embodies the very reason for the emergence of Mexican American/Chicano Studies.

Until the Chicano Movement, Mexican Americans—treated as an internal colony of the United States—were taught little about their own history, contributions, and struggles. U.S. schools perpetuated a Eurocentric curriculum, indoctrinating students into myths of Manifest Destiny while erasing the histories of Indigenous, Black, Asian American, and Mexican American peoples.

As Ortego recounts, Mexican Americans have fought in every U.S. war, demonstrated their loyalty, and demanded their rightful place in the American mosaic. The Chicano Renaissance gave rise to a literature and scholarship that insisted: Mexican Americans are not who mainstream America says they are; only we can tell our own story.

In 2012, Arizona’s HB 2281 targeted Mexican American Studies in Tucson, banning classic works by Anzaldúa, Freire, Acuña, and even Shakespeare. Dr. Ortego correctly identified this as an expression of racism and fear: a refusal to allow students of color to see themselves reflected in history.

Now, looking back from the vantage point of 2025, we see that the attacks on knowledge, history, and identity have only intensified—book bans, anti-DEI legislation, and renewed efforts to silence Ethnic Studies. The struggle continues. And as Ortego insisted, so must we.

Book bans, as he recounts, are atrocious. Heartening is the thought that so many of these books are only a click away.

As Chicanas and Chicanos, as Mexicanas and Mexicanos, as Mexican Americans, we are—always and without question—on our land and in our homeland. This truth cannot be erased. It obligates us to defend Chicana/o Studies, and Ethnic Studies more broadly, because these fields are the repositories of our histories, our voices, and our dignity. Without them, we risk surrendering our story to those who would distort or erase it. That is a price far too exacting to pay.

We are always on our land. We have nowhere to go back to. Our ancestors roamed Turtle Island freely.

As I've always said, someday, these studies will simply be called, "a good and virtuous education." 

-Angela Valenzuela

 “If George Washington’s, my father, why wasn’t he Chicano?" 

by 

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

Dr. Felipe de Ortego y Gasca

The title of this piece are the last lines of a poem by Richard Olivas penned some years ago. Sitting in his history class, Olivas asked: “If George Washington’s, my father, why wasn’t he Chicano? The question raised in the poem embodies the reason for the emergence of Mexican American/Chicano Studies.

Indeed, the White Studies curriculum of American schools indoctrinates students in American classrooms in the apodictive historical perspective of the nation—myths and all. Until the advent of the Chicano Movement Mexican Americans knew little about their history in the United States as a colonized people. 

Mexican America as an internal American colony

Blame it on Manifest Destiny! By hook or crook, the United States was determined to extend its domain from sea to shining sea. But Mexico was standing in the way. In 1846, President James K. Polk declared war on Mexico on the pretext that Mexico had invaded the United States by crossing into Brownsville, Texas, with armed troops. Only the year before, the United States had admitted Texas into the union even though Mexico had never acknowledged the break-away independence of its Texas province. Despite this international state of affairs with Texas, dead-set on adding Texas to the union, the United States annexed Texas in 1845. 

The U.S. War against Mexico lasted less than 2 years, after which per the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo signed on February 2, 1848, the United States dismembered Mexico and annexed more than half of its territory, permitting Mexicans (by choice) to remain in the American acquired territory of Mexico or to relocate to the new boundaries of Mexico. My father’s family chose to relocate to Guanajuato, Mexico; while my mother’s family chose to remain in San Antonio, Texas, where they had settled in 1731, some 45 years before the break-away American colonies of England in 1776. Most Mexicans opted to stay with what they considered their homeland. 

As an internally colonized people, Mexicans—now Americans by fiat—had to learn English, how to navigate the American political system, and how to survive the American schools. I wrote about that survival in 1970 in a piece entitled “Montezuma’s Children,” published as a cover story by The Center Magazine of the John Maynard Hutchins Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions. The piece was read into the Congressional Record by Senator Ralph Yarbrough of Texas in 1970 and was recommended for a Pulitzer. 

 

Mexican America comes of Age

For 162 years—from 1848 to 1960—Mexican Americans sought to become the citizens the United States expected them to be: They fought in every American war since then, distinguishing themselves in World War II as the only group to win more Medals of Honor than any other group. Of the 16 million Americans who served in that conflict, 1 million were Mexican Americans. When the United States called on Americans to defend the nation, Mexican Americans have responded overwhelmingly. 

Mexican American loyalty and allegiance to the American flag has not waned. What changed was Mexican American expectations of equality for their service to the nation. Those expectations surfaced in 1960 with the Chicano Movement—a groundswell of patriotism in search of recognition. Out of that groundswell emerged the Chicano Renaissance: a literary recognition of their evolution in the American mosaic. In the Fall of 1969 I taught the first course in Mexican American/ Chicano literature at the University of New Mexico. In 1971 I completed Backgrounds of Mexican American Literature(University of New Mexico, 1971), first historical and taxonomic study in the field. In 1960, only 10 novels by Mexican Americans had been published in the United States. Since then, the count has swelled to hundreds. Overall, the count of books by Mexican Americans in the American publishing arena is in the thousands. Mexican Americans realized that if America is to know who Mexican Americans are, then Mexican Americans must write their own stories. Mexican Americans are not who mainstream America says they are; Mexican Americans are the only ones who can say who they are. 

Today, the most egregious example of prejudice and discrimination based on ethnicity and ancestry is the situation in the Tucson Independent School District where Mexican American Studies has been eliminated as a program of study and a list of particular books bans their use in classrooms. These are books by eminent Chicano and Native American scholars. Banned also are Civil Disobedience, Brave New World and Shakespeare's The Tempest. The logic defies understanding except that it seems to be based on ethnicity and ancestry.

All of this hullaballoo is the result of Arizona House Bill 2281 signed by Governor Jan Brewer banning Ethnic Studies Programs (which includes Chicano Studies) on the grounds that these Programs advocate ethnic separatism and encourages Latinos to rise up and create a new territory out of the southwestern region of the United States. Perhaps those Xenophobes need a history lesson on how the Hispanic Southwest came into the American fold. They also need to look at school textbooks to see how under-represented Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans are in those textbooks. Which is why we need Asian American Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, and Mexican American Studies. What are white Arizonans really afraid of? HB 2281 has come to the attention of the United Nations which condemns the Bill, citing Arizona’s rage against immigration and ethnic minorities as “a disturbing pattern of hostile legislative activity.” The better word would be “racism.”

Chicano Studies as the Voice of Chicanos

Forty-eight years ago when I began university teaching after some years as a high school teacher of French, there was no Chicano Stud­ies. That is, no Chicano Studies as an organized field of study. To be sure, there were Mexican American scholars working on various aspects of Mexican Amer­ican life and its cultural productions, scholars like Aurelio Espinosa, Juan Rael, Arturo Campa, Fray Angelico Chaves, George I. Sanchez, Americo Paredes, and others. Important as this scholarship was, it emerged amorphously, reflecting independ­ent intellectual interests rather than a scholarship reflecting a field of study. This is not to say that some of these scholars may not have considered their work as part of a field of study conceptualized as Mexican American Studies. Despite its lack of an under-pinning, it was a field of Mexican American Studies, its constituent parts subsumed as American folklore. 

 

This situation created a critical barrier to the public discussion and dissemination of information about the presence of Mexican Americans in the Unit­ed States and their contributions to American society. Until 1960 and the emergence of the Chi­cano Movement, Mexican Americans were charac­terized by mainstream American schol­ars–-principally anthropologists and social work­ers–-in terms of the queer, the curious, and the quaint. That is, Mexican Amer­icans were categorized as just another item in the flora and fauna of Americana. 

The Chicano Movement–that wave of concientizaci­on that came to bloom among Mexican Americans in the 60's transforming them into Chica­nos– help­ed to change American perceptions about Mexican Americans. While Mexican Americans knew much about Anglo Americans, Anglo Ameri­cans knew little about Mexican Americans.

In 1970 I was recruited to be founding director of the Chicano Studies Program at the University of Texas at El Paso, first such program in the state (and still there). By this time, I had become “conscien­tized” as a Chicano. From 1967 on, I had become identified as a Quinto Sol Writer, that is, among the first wave of Chicano writers of the Chi­cano Renaissance which had its beginning in 1966 with the creation of Quinto Sol Publica­tions.

The Arizona Challenge

Mexican American accounts of who they are are being challenged in Arizona. The Tucson Unified School District in Arizona made headlines in recent weeks when it eliminated its Mexican American Studies program. John Huppenthal, the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, declared the program illegal under a state law that bans racially-divisive classes. Books by Mexican American authors have been yanked from TUSD classrooms: Message to Aztlán by Rodolfo Corky Gonzales (2001) and Chicano! A History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales (1997). 

Everywhere, there are xenophobic and fas­cist forces that threaten the existence of Chicano Studies. Mainstream suspicions about the ideological agenda of Chicano Studies has become paranoiac. In Arizona there are legislative initiatives to remove from the schools programs deemed to be seditious, programs that promote divisiveness and breed revo­lution, programs like Chic­ano Studies–any ethnic studies program that challen­ges Western values. One Arizona legislator believes that such an initiative will restore the image of the United States as a “melt­ing pot”—that relic salvaged from the reliquary of dystopic America.

Tony Diaz, founder of the literary nonprofit Nuestra Palabra: Latino Writers Having Their Say is organizing a caravan from Houston to Tucson over spring break to raise awareness about the situation and taking Hispanic books to Tucson students. He calls it the Librotraficante movement. It begins in Houston on Monday, March 12 and ends in Tucson on Saturday, March 17. Along the way, the caravan will stop in San Antonio, El Paso and Albuquerque, for read-ins and other activities. The caravan will be filled with authors and activists, accruing people as it proceeds toward Tucson.

Como una hija querida, tenemos que defender Chicano Studies porque si no, perderemos nuestro futuro. That’s too important a future to lose, too ex­acting a price to pay. This is the exact moment of history for Chicanos to rise to the occasion. Inaction sustains the status quo. Now, more than ever, we must band together in common cause. Chicano Stud­ies deserves no less. Actually, all Americans must stand up to this current wave of xenophobia.

WORKS CENSORED OR BANNED BY THE TUCSON SCHOOL DISTRICT PER SB 2281

American Government/Social Justice/Education

• Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson 
• The Latino Condition: A Critical Reader (1998) by R. Delgado and J. Stefancic 
• Critical Race Theory: An Introduction (2001) by R. Delgado and J. Stefancic 
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000) by P. Freire 
• United States Government: Democracy in Action (2007) by R. C. Remy 
• Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006) by F. A. Rosales 
• Declarations of Independence: Cross-Examining American Ideology (1990) by H. Zinn

American History/Mexican American Perspectives 

• Occupied America: A History of Chicanos (2004) by R. Acuña 
• The Anaya Reader (1995) by R. Anaya 
• The American Vision (2008) by J. Appleby et el. 
• Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years (1998) by B. Bigelow and B. Peterson 
• Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992) by J. A. Burciaga 
• Message to Aztlán: Selected Writings (1997) by R.  Gonzales 
• De Colores Means All of Us: Latina Views Multi-Colored Century (1998) by E. S. Martínez 
• 500 Años Del Pueblo Chicano/500 Years of Chicano History in Pictures (1990) by E. S. Martínez 
• Codex Tamuanchan: On Becoming Human (1998) by R. Rodríguez 
• The X in La Raza II (1996) by R. Rodríguez 
• Dictionary of Latino Civil Rights History (2006) by F. A. Rosales 
• A People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present (2003) by H. Zinn

English/Latino Literature 

• Ten Little Indians (2004) by S. Alexie 
• The Fire Next Time (1990) by J. Baldwin 
• Loverboys (2008) by A. Castillo 
• Women Hollering Creek (1992) by S. Cisneros 
• Mexican White Boy (2008) by M. de la Pena
• Drown (1997) by J. Díaz 
• Woodcuts of Women (2000) by D. Gilb 
• At the Afro-Asian Conference in Algeria (1965) by E. Guevara 
• Color Lines: "Does Anti-War Have to Be Anti-Racist Too?" (2003) by E. Martínez 
• Culture Clash: Life, Death and Revolutionary Comedy (1998) by R. Montoya et al.
• Let Their Spirits Dance (2003) by S. Pope Duarte 
• Two Badges: The Lives of Mona Ruiz (1997) by M. Ruiz 
• The Tempest (1994) by W. Shakespeare 
• A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993) by R. Takaki 
• The Devil's Highway (2004) by L. A. Urrea 
• Puro Teatro: A Latino Anthology (1999) by A. Sandoval-Sanchez & N. Saporta Sternbach 
• Twelve Impossible Things before Breakfast: Stories (1997) by J. Yolen 
• Voices of a People's History of the United States (2004) by H. Zinn

• Live from Death Row (1996) by J. Abu-Jamal 
• The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven (1994) by S. Alexie 
• Zorro (2005) by I. Allende 
• Borderlands La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1999) by G. Anzaldua 
• A Place to Stand (2002), by J. S. Baca 
• C-Train and Thirteen Mexicans (2002), by J. S. Baca 
• Healing Earthquakes: Poems (2001) by J. S. Baca 
• Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems (1990) by J. S. Baca 
• Black Mesa Poems (1989) by J. S. Baca 
• Martin & Mediations on the South Valley (1987) by J. S. Baca 
• The Manufactured Crisis: Myths, Fraud, and the Attack on America's Public Schools (1995) by D. C. Berliner and B. J. Biddle 
• Drink Cultura: Chicanismo (1992) by J. A Burciaga 
• Red Hot Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Being Young and Latino in the United States (2005) by L. Carlson & O. Hijuielos 
• Cool Salsa: Bilingual Poems on Growing up Latino in the United States (1995) by L. Carlson & O. Hijuelos 
• So Far From God (1993) by A. Castillo 
• Address to the Commonwealth Club of California (1985) by C. E. Chávez 
• Women Hollering Creek (1992) by S. Cisneros 
• House on Mango Street (1991), by S. Cisneros 
• Drown (1997) by J. Díaz 
• Suffer Smoke (2001) by E. Diaz Bjorkquist 
• Zapata's Discipline: Essays (1998) by M. Espada 
• Like Water for Chocolate (1995) by L. Esquievel 
• When Living was a Labor Camp (2000) by D. García 
• La Llorona: Our Lady of Deformities (2000), by R. Garcia 
• Cantos Al Sexto Sol: An Anthology of Aztlanahuac Writing (2003) by C. García-Camarilo et al.
• The Magic of Blood (1994) by D. Gilb 
• Message to Aztlan: Selected Writings (2001) by Rodolfo "Corky" Gonzales 
• Saving Our Schools: The Case for Public Education, Saying No to "No Child Left Behind" (2004) by Goodman et al.
• Feminism is for Everybody (2000) by b hooks 
• The Circuit: Stories from the Life of a Migrant Child (1999) by F. Jiménez 
• Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools (1991) by J. Kozol 
• Zigzagger (2003) by M. Muñoz 
• Infinite Divisions: An Anthology of Chicana Literature (1993) by T. D. Rebolledo & E. S. Rivero 
• ...y no se lo trago la tierra/And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (1995) by T. Rivera 
• Always Running - La Vida Loca: Gang Days in L.A. (2005) by L. Rodriguez 
• Justice: A Question of Race (1997) by R. Rodríguez 
• The X in La Raza II (1996) by R. Rodríguez 
• Crisis in American Institutions (2006) by S. H. Skolnick & E. Currie 
• Los Tucsonenses: The Mexican Community in Tucson, 1854-1941 (1986) by T. Sheridan 
• Curandera (1993) by Carmen Tafolla 
• Mexican American Literature (1990) by C. M. Tatum 
• New Chicana/Chicano Writing (1993) by C. M. Tatum 
• Civil Disobedience (1993) by H. D. Thoreau 
• By the Lake of Sleeping Children (1996) by L. A. Urrea 
• Nobody's Son: Notes from an American Life (2002) by L. A. Urrea 
• Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992) by L. Valdez 
• Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert (1995) by O. Zepeda

UPDATE, Monday, January 16, 2012

Bless Me Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya 

• Yo Soy Joaquin/I Am Joaquin by Rodolfo Gonzales 
• Into the Beautiful North by Luis Alberto Urrea 
• The Devil's Highway by Luis Alberto Urrea

Ethnic Studies, Anti-Mexicanism & the Chicano Moratorium—Webinar, Thursday PM, August 27, 2020

I am happy to announce this free webinar featuring these outstanding scholars, notably, Drs. Irene Vasquez, Juan Gomez-Quiñones, and Álvaro Huerta to commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Chicano Moratorium and the continued push to implement Ethnic Studies as a requirement in K-12 & higher education throughout the nation.

It's titled, "Ethnic Studies, Anti-Mexicanism & The Chicano Moratorium," Thursday, August 27, 2020, from 6pm to 7:30pm (pacific time) taking place on Thursday, August 27, 2020 from 6-7:30PM PST / to 8-9:30PM CST. You can view it on Facebook live here.  

Register (Zoom): https://cccconfer.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYqf-Cspz4qHdDEX84P-7OEus3ZHhJQMxIy

Looking forward to this!

-Angela Valenzuela

#EthnicStudiesNow

#MexicanAmericanStudies

Reverberations of Memory,Violence, And History: A Conference for theCentennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation

Friends, 

Do consider attending this conference taking place January 31-February 1, 2019 at the Bullock Museum located at 1800 Congress Ave., Austin, TX 78701 • Map it

-Angela

#1919Canales

Reverberations of Memory,Violence, And History: A Conference for theCentennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation

RSVP

January 31, 2019 - February 1, 2019

Over ninety years ago, a border native and the only Mexican American serving in the state legislature, José Tomas ‘JT’ Canales called for an investigation into state-sanctioned violence unleashed on the predominantly Mexican-origin community in the state’s southern border.

This two-day conference held on the centennial of that investigation will dive deep into that investigation and its ongoing legacies in the state of Texas.

Event Details

The Bullock Museum is pleased to host a FREE two-day conference exploring the 1919 Canales Investigation and its ongoing legacies in Texas. Presentations will feature internationally-recognized scholars and researchers from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, who will deliver different perspectives on the history of lynching and other extralegal violence in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the U.S. South. Topics of discussion will include the relationship between Mexican American communities and the Texas Rangers, women’s anti-lynching activism, histories of racialized state violence, and the importance of civil rights struggles throughout the twentieth century, all set within broader considerations of borderlands and transnational history.

Sessions run 8:30am-5:30pm on Thursday, January 31st and 8:30am-4:30pm on Friday, February 1st. Click here for preliminary session and presenter details.

Registration is now open for this conference! Click the RSVP link to register. 

The 1919 Canales Investigation Conference is co-sponsored by:

·       National Endowment for the Humanities

·       Bullock Texas State History Museum

·       Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture

·       Glassock Center for Humanities Research 

·       Clements Center for Southwestern Studies, Southern Methodist University

·       Latino & Mexican American Studies @ Texas A&M University 

·       The Center for Mexican American Studies, The University of Texas at Austin

·       Refusing to Forget 

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this forthcoming conference and subsequent edited volume, do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Support for the Bullock Museum's exhibitions and education programs provided by the Texas State History Museum Foundation.

The 66 Percent: Erasing Mexican Americans in the United States

Why aren’t we going past wanting to educate MexAm children to have ordinary pride in who they are and where they’ve come from?

Flaco Jimenez and Max Baca on stage at Flamingo Cantina, Austin, in December 2013.  FLICKR/ROBOTCLAW PHOTO

by Dagoberto Gilb

PublishedTue, May 17, 2016

If you’re from Texas, or the American Southwest for that matter, and a fan of its music, your ears surely perked up when the popular National Public Radio program Fresh Air focused an episode on the accordion. Many would say that the “squeeze box” is the region’s sound, and thus its most original contribution to America’s musical heritage. Yet that’s not what Fresh Air’s host had heard or knew anything about. Instead, she’d thought the instrument was about as exciting as the 1950s TV show with Lawrence Welk — which was for an already dated, slow waltz crowd in the years it was being produced. She considered accordions, therefore, corny and annoying, valuable only, maybe, for bar mitzvahs. But times changed, her ears were re-tuned, and with her show’s guest, we were to learn that the accordion was a surprisingly not dull instrument, loved in Cajun, avant garde, folk, indie pop, even something called klezmer, and that its sound’s reach was not just Eastern Europe, but Argentina, Madagascar and especially in a new French Musette “explosion.”

Out in the boonies of America’s West, where these national shows are well-heard, there lives a loud, boisterous tradition of music that dates from the turn of the last century that goes by the name “conjunto.” It is true that it belongs to a native people of the West, a peoples whose history can be traced back at least two centuries to what is American soil — born and raised within the geographical and historical boundaries of the United States — and this music, which at its big stage center is the accordion, has been its magnetic draw. Not only in the legendary sound of South Texas’s Narciso Martínez, or San Antonio’s Don Santiago Jiménez, but especially through his two sons, Santiago Jr., and Leonardo, better known as “skinny”: Flaco Jiménez’s fame, in particular, is so grand and wide that in 2015 he received a Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award for his accordion virtuosity and preeminence. And it was the Mexican American music — not South American, African, or European — that didn’t get a mention on Fresh Air’s one-hour episode.

Really there is nothing surprising or new about most of the country being unaware of the culture and community of MexAmerica. On the other hand, it is such a strange form of ignorance — let me hyphenate to adjust the connotation, make it ignore-ance — that one might want to call it utterly fascinating in that unique quality. It requires omitting consciousness that so much of the western landmass of continental United States has rivers, valleys, mountain ranges, states, cities, streets and people with Spanish-language names. Over the years (and by years I mean at least 50) historians and scholars are inclined to attribute that unawareness to an “invisibility” of the community.

But the implication of this becomes that it must be something of a quaint, natural character inside the MexAm people, and not the effect of poverty or consequence of a lack of political power. I’d suggest that it’s more a visual degeneration in the center of the dominant culture’s eyes. No faces, only hands serving enchilada plates and then busing away what’s left of the spicy yum yum. Beds are made after a fun vacation day, floors swept and waxed for the bright, bustling morning in the office, lawns mowed and edged, healthy veggies are in the grocery store: People are not seen, neighborhoods go unknown, songs unheard, deaths not mourned… no cries of birth, sighs of first love, screams of sports joy; no bandages for knees, catechisms for church, homework for teacher, pink socks or baseballs or first cars or skateboards or bad boyfriends or off to war or diplomas or retirement dinners or college or family potlucks or ’buelita turned 99. And though I believe most of the ignorance about MexAms is not conscious or willful, it is equally true that enough is, be it forced by racist politicians in Arizona, or an ongoing blow of American history that began with President James K. Polk’s want of the land by any means necessary.

Even now, too many media stories that do attach are about immigration from the border, inferring that the entire community is recent and, worse, invasive — which, ironically, would be more appropriately descriptive of the Anglo migration from the South in Texas and the Midwest in California. More ironic — bizarre? — is how much it loves, besides the food, everything about the region’s Mexican culture, art and architecture, yet is shocked that these “other” people live here. “Invisible” is not the best word, that is certain. The culture is everywhere, is highly accepted, as mainstream American as the taco has become. But just as the Spanish rejected the corn tortilla of the conquered indios, the essence of the MexAm culture is regarded as too “lesser” to be taken seriously.

Accustomed as its own nation is to treating Mexican Americans as negligible or dismissible, times are changing as demographics do. It is said that this century will be about the power of the Latino. Latino? Take away the 66 percent of this population, the MexAm proportion, that one so hidden away in its western homeland, and what national power then? With the other third divided into several single percentage groups, MexAms ought to receive a landslide of attention. Yet, already and again, the raw facts haven’t created any gain, let alone advantage. Money and political pull are on the East Coast, and the national media’s stories are about those who are there; Puerto Ricans, Cubans and Dominicans are more the voice of The Latino, following the last century’s big city paradigm of Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants. MexAms don’t fly from New York to Mexico City, Los Angeles to Chihuahua. Instead, they are home in a poor city like El Paso or Ysleta or Eagle Pass, McAllen, San Antonio, Santa Ana, Riverside, Fresno, Chula Vista, Tucson, Nogales, Albuquerque, Denver, or Boyle Heights, El Monte, La Puente, Lynwood, South Gate. Though everybody’s house has family allá, most have never been farther across — across, meaning the “other side,” Mexico — than Matamoros, Juárez or Tijuana to look for cheaper prescription drugs or dentistry.

And so it goes with literature. The “national” scene knows the very least about Mexican American literature, historically or currently. Though it may not always be as clear as an Arizona school board banning material for ambitious, college-bound young Mexican American students who notice their culture’s absence in their curriculum, the offense, sadly, is the same, only larger in scale, when written voices and stories are passively ignored by all school districts, even when their student body is predominantly of Mexican American descent. Or even more: Why aren’t we going past wanting to educate MexAm children, in their own neighborhoods, to have ordinary pride in who they are and where they’ve come from, and asking how long all of our country can ignore a huge American region and heritage? How can it not want to understand or appreciate its people beyond enchilada or child-care talents, but as craftsmen, business owners, artisans and artists, thinkers, as purposeful voters, as the country’s future leaders? Too much to say as friends? As those who work alongside so many and have children who are in the same classes as their own? Is it possible to ignore and dismiss, to undervalue, an entire people without consequence? How should we educate all our own to each other?

[This essay is adapted from the recently published Mexican American Literature: A Portable Anthology. The featured image is via Flaco Jimenez/Facebook.</a>]